Oh FFS.
Did someone in a BAE t-shirt molest you in your pram, BEags?
Or were you mug enough to buy one of their cars, or a barrow load of their shares?
BAE Systems may well have occasionally profiteered at the expense of the customer, and it may well have made a bollocks of a project or two.
But this incessant BAE bashing is getting tiresome.
It's a good company, generally, and a company that has often 'gone the extra mile' to support the war-fighter (that's you blokes), and that has produced the odd world beating product.
Many of its employees are your former comrades in arms, your ex-Students, and some of your former instructors and seniors, I suspect. All people who care deeply about aviation and the Royal Air Force. Not all, of course, but then there are irredeemably blunt chiselling tw@ts in the RAF, too.
And there was never enough evidence of wrongdoing to justify the launch of this misbegotten, expensive, wasteful, mischievously-motivated probe in the first place. The Lord Chancellor judged then that there was no chance of a successful prosecution.
Like EVERY other company dealing in the Middle East, BAE paid commissions back in the 1980s. An unholy alliance of peacenik Campaigners Against the Arms Trade and f*ckwit Guardian journos (two categories of people who make strange bed-fellows with a retired Squadron Leader and highly respected former tanker ace like you, I'd have thunk) don't like BAE, don't like the arms trade, and especially don't like Saudi Arabia, and have stooped to some astonishingly low tricks to try to smear BAE and cause it as many problems as they can.
I'm not an uncritical admirer of BAE Systems by any means, but I know which side I support in this fracas.
1) This is ancient history
2) This is flimsy stuff and the balance of evidence is that BAE at least tried to stay on the right side of the line
3) Pursuing this ancient history (which was never likely to achieve anything) stood to cause immense damage to UK plc TODAY.
The SFO was right (as well as legally entitled) to drop this. The big question for me is whether it was ever right to spend public money launching an investigation in the first place.
When will you lot be satisfied? When the Saudis have ****-canned their Typhoon deal, or when BAE Systems moves its entire operation stateside, or goes to the wall?